One Beautiful Spring Day by Jim Woodring

This collection gathers three of Jim Woodring’s graphic novels about the bipedal anthropomorph, Frank, and adds 100 pages of new work in which we witness Frank gaining, losing, and/or regaining friends, a romantic partner, his home, and his pets (the adorable Pupshaw and Pushpaw). Like all Frank stories, this one is wordless, with images rendered in thick lines with a steel-nibbed pen that gives them a classic feel running counter to the surrealism of the stories themselves. When you factor in the child-like nature of Frank and the other characters, the result is a touching, yet hilariously disturbing saga of friends seeking happiness in novelty but finding greater value in the familiar.